The deception had been the work of ‘Vovan’ and ‘Lexus’, a pair of Russian pranksters who a few years earlier had managed to persuade Elton John that he was speaking on the phone with Vladimir Putin about how to promote gay rights in Russia. For Harry, the hoaxers had adopted a ruse that would also fool US presidential hopeful Bernie Sanders – enlisting a female accomplice to mimic the Swedish accent of teenage climate activist Greta Thunberg, along with her ‘father’ Svante.
‘Greta’, of course, had been one of the faces featured on the cover of Meghan’s ‘Forces for CHANGE’ issue for Vogue, and she quickly got Harry to condemn President Trump as a man who had ‘blood on his hands’, and even to give his opinion – a real ‘no-no’ for a member of the British royal family – on the character of Prime Minister Boris Johnson. The prince described Boris as ‘a good man’, but in need of some personal help from Greta.
‘You are one of the few people who can reach into his soul,’ Harry told her, ‘and get him to feel and believe in you.’
The prince was prudent enough not to be drawn by ‘Greta’s’ probing on the subject of his Uncle Andrew and his relationship with the convicted sex offender Jeffrey Epstein.
‘I have very little to say on that,’ replied the prince. ‘Whatever he has done or hasn’t done is completely separate from me and my wife.’
That was canny. But as more details of the conversation emerged in the coming days it became clear that Harry and his new non-royal minders – most of them connected with Sunshine Sachs – had been appallingly lax. There had been phone calls from the practical jokers to the Sussexes’ landline in Vancouver. According to one source, it was even Harry who had called ‘Greta’ on the number that the Russians had helpfully provided, believing that the activist was in Davos attending the World Economic Forum.
The hoaxers would never have been able to get through the safeguards built into the Buckingham Palace switchboard. ‘They’re pretty vigilant,’ explained the Queen’s former press secretary Dickie Arbiter, adding: ‘If you’re outside the system, you’re open to anything … For all its faults, the system does, and is there to, protect.’
Soon after Arbiter spoke, the entire conversation between Harry and ‘Greta’ was going up on the Internet for everyone to relish. ‘Greta’ even asked the prince if he could help her arrange a marriage into the royal family, confiding that she was rather attracted to the six-year-old Prince George – the ten-year age gap between them being no problem, apparently. She wondered if such a dynastic marriage ‘will help me in fighting for climate change’?
‘I can assure you,’ responded Harry, ‘marrying a prince or princess is not all it’s made up to be.’
From the point of view of Harry’s ecological credentials that lay at the heart of the conversation, the prince’s most appalling mistake came when ‘Greta’ and ‘Svante’ requested his help with the fate of fifty penguins which, they told him, were stuck in customs in Belarus.
‘We are searching,’ explained ‘Greta’, ‘for some ship, maybe, to transport the poor penguins to their native place.’
‘[The] North Pole,’ prompted her ‘father’ with well-crafted mischief. ‘Maybe you have any contacts who can help us to find a catamaran or something like that?’
‘I do have a man who deals with the North Pole,’ responded Harry helpfully.
The problem, of course, was that there are no penguins at all in the Arctic. The aquatic flightless birds are native to Antarctica – the South Pole …
The paradox of all this relentless trickery was that Prince Harry Duke of Sussex would eventually emerge from his poisonous encounter with ‘Greta’ and ‘Svante’ with a certain amount of credit. The Russian pranksters had succeeded in coaxing him into speaking from the heart. ‘You forget,’ said Harry, ‘I was in the military for ten years, so I’m more normal than my family would like to believe.’
Normality! Normality! This was what Harry and his wife had been searching for. ‘Being in a different position,’ he said, ‘now gives us the ability to say things and do things that we might not have been able to do … Seeing as everyone under the age of thirty-five or thirty-six seems to be carrying out an activist’s role … we are just taking a little bit more time to think about how we can use our voice to try and encourage real change.’
‘To try and encourage real change …’ Here was Reason One for Harry and Meghan having surrendered their not-so-treasured royal status – to enjoy the freedom to speak out and to agitate for change more easily, without royal constitutional constraints. The couple wanted the chance ‘to try and make more of a difference without being criticised’.
And Reason Two for their leaving was no surprise – the hated British tabloid media, ‘because they have so much power and influence and no morals … From the moment that I found a wife that was strong enough to be able to stand up for what we believe in together,’ said Harry, ‘[that] has basically scared them so much that they’ve now come out incredibly angry. They’ve come out fighting, and all they will try and do now is try and destroy our reputation and try and, you know, sink us.’
The media onslaught had been ‘a dreadful ordeal’ for him and Meghan, confided Harry, as he opened his heart to ‘Greta’. ‘It hasn’t been very nice. It’s been horrible. But we will come out of it stronger people.’
And Reason Three for leaving Britain was Baby Archie: ‘Sometimes the right decision isn’t always the easy one,’ said Harry. ‘And this decision certainly wasn’t the easy
